Found the article below on a news web site. Many of us on the list will
recall Mr. Blosser's name. The comment about GIMPS slowing the
machines is unexpected, unless he set the priority way up.
Hacker accused of using U S West computers on math problem
DENVER (AP) -- A 28-year-old computer expert is accused of hacking
into the U S West computer system and diverting more than 2,500
machines that should have been helping answer phones
to his effort to solve a 350-year-old math problem, according to
documents filed in a federal court.
Aaron Blosser also allegedly obtained the passwords to 15,000 U S
West phone company workstations and sent much of the coded material
he found in them onto the Internet, according to an FBI search warrant
served at his Lakewood, Colorado, home last Wednesday.
The warrant says Blosser, a contract computer consultant who worked
for a vendor that was hired by Denver-based U S West, is under
investigation for computer fraud.
In a telephone interview with The Denver Post, Blosser said he has not
been
charged with any crime and said he made no money from his
unauthorized
use of U S West computers. He also failed in his mathematical quest: the
search for a new prime number.
"I've worked on this (math) problem for a long time," said Blosser. "When
I
started working at U S West, all that computational power was just too
tempting for me."
Blosser enlisted 2,585 computers to work at various times during the day
and night and quickly ran up 10.63 years of computer processing time in
his
search for a new prime number.
U S West spokesman David Beigie called the hacking "unprecedented" in
company history. "It would be virtually impossible to do it from the
outside,"
he said.
Blosser's alleged hacking was discovered when computers at U S
West's
facility in Phoenix, which normally respond in 3 to 5 seconds, took as
long
as five minutes to retrieve telephone numbers.
The computers were so slow in mid-May that customer calls had to be
rerouted to other states, and at one point the delays threatened to close
down the Phoenix Service Delivery Center.
On May 27, U S West's Intrusion Response Team found a software
program on the system that "captured U S West computers to work on a
project unrelated to U S West Services," according to the search
warrant.
The anti-hacking team traced the software to a terminal at the company's
Littleton offices, where they found Blosser, a self-described "math
geek."
Blosser allegedly showed agents how he remotely installed software on
computers throughout the U S West system and reprogrammed them to
search for a new prime number.
